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Father of Sandy Hook victim warns against conspiracy theories

After the Quebec mosque shooting, conspiracy theories spread online. Lenny Pozner, whose son died in the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary, knows the story well. Conspiracy theories claimed the shooting never happened, his son had never existed, and it was all a pretext to take away liberty.

CBC Radio · February 4, 2017

The city of Victoria and the Muslim community held a vigil on Jan. 31 to honour the victims of the Quebec City mosque shooting. (Chad Hipolitio/CP)

Within hours of the shootings at a Quebec mosque, conspiracy theories about the event began to spread online.

On Youtube, there are already dozens of videos claiming the killings were a "false flag," a military term for an attack carried out under another country's flag, intended to deceive or cause confusion about who was responsible.

On sites like The Rebel and InfoWars, you can find speculation that the official story of events is inaccurate or misleading, that the police aren't being as truthful as they could about what happened that night, and that the mainstream media is avoiding questions about why one person was originally treated as a suspect and was then released as a witness.

On his Youtube channel, American conspiracy theorist Alex Jones recently interviewed what he called a 'terrorism expert' who suggested the killings at the Quebec City mosque were staged to discredit Donald Trump's policies.

After that incident, conspiracy theorists spread videos online questioning whether the shooting had ever actually taken place, whether the victims, like Pozner's son, had even existed at all, and claiming that the whole story was cooked up as a pretext to confiscate guns. Alex Jones once claimed the massacre was "completely fake, with actors."

The model that they follow, as soon as there's a public incident such as this, a mass casualty event, it must be a 'false flag' right away... they start to look for anything that's out of place or anything that's a coincidence, they start looking for anomalies and look for patterns, and then just the existence of those things is proof it's not a real event in the way they present it.- Lenny Pozner, HONR Network, honr.com

Jones, like The Rebel in their coverage of the Quebec killings, says he's just asking questions the mainstream media won't.

Pozner now runs a foundation dedicated to eradicating false news. For people in Canada, should they come across people spreading conspiracy theories about the Quebec shooting, Pozner says the appropriate response is to call it out.

A lot of people still stick with the 'don't feed the trolls' idea but I don't think that's what freedom of speech is about... if enough people disagree with it they need to voice their opinion. Of course, these people can be outnumbered if everyone wasn't silent about it.- Lenny Pozner, HONR Network, honr.com

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